Basically, “Sex by Deception” describes the bedtrick plots of Shakespeare’s plays Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. To preserve the chastity of Isabella, the novitiate in Measure for Measure, a substitute sleeps with Angelo—his jilted fiancé Mariana. Though believing that the woman in the garden cottage was Isabella, Angelo doesn’t keep his part of his bargain :Isabella’s virginity in exchange for her brother Claudio’s life. Instead, Angelo orders his hasty execution. Only the disguised Duke can circumvent Claudio’s precipitous death.
In All’s Well, Helena, the wife rejected by Bertram before their marriage is consummated, takes the place of Diana, the woman Bertram lusts after, in a dark-of-the night tryst. Helena thus attains the ring and pregnancy, Bertram’s seemingly impossible conditions for fulfilling their marriage vows.
Angelo and Betram are deceived by their bedmates, an issue currently debated in legislatures across the country. Click for link to NY Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23
My novel is entitled Bedtrick, as is the play that tells a similar story. No deception exists between the couple who marry; it is the public who are deceived. For much of the story, their marriage is not consummated. Yet it fits Wendy Doniger’s definition in her study bearing the same title: a bedtrick is any lie about sex.
A friend criticized my title because of possible misunderstandings of the word ‘trick, but I use “bedtrick” in two other senses. Besides referring to the plays Shakespeare writes from 1599-1603, the time frame of my novel, it characterizes the hoax the couple play on the public. In truth they’re both women; one convincingly passes as male. Her name is Alexander Cooke, as is an actor listed in Shakespeare’s First Folio. Cooke’s nickname Sander appears in Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642,, but her gender is my invention, so far as history records. Cooke was known for originating Shakespeare’s female roles. In my story, the playwright is among the few aware of her true gender. You can’t play tricks on William Shakespeare!
Cooke and Shakespeare possess theatrical souls. Onstage, masquerade passes for reality. In their day, boys and men played female roles and disguised characters are generally taken on appearance. So too with kings, lords, and ladies. Actors, a sketchy social group at best, garbed in cast-off clothes from their betters pass for royalty.
Lies, deception, and feigning are central to Shakespeare’s comedies. In Twelfth Night, Caesario—Viola disguised as male for her safety—says “Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness.” The Countess Olivia has fallen in love with the young man Viola appears to be. Perhaps Olivia’s happily taking a man who looks just like Caesario to church is fraud: he’s Sebastian, Viola’s twin. But the couple becomes formally betrothed; consummation is postponed. Olivia must discover who she’s marrying and Sebastian understand why she seized him the moment he arrived in town. The “wickedness” turns out happily for the lovers. Caesario, revealed as female and hiding her love for Count Orsino, will share a double wedding with Sebastian and Olivia.
But after the two so-called problem plays, Measure for Measure and All’s Well that require bedtrick plots, Shakespeare writes no more comedies. His late plays identified as comedies in by Condell and Hemmings in the First Folio, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, have long been labeled romances, along with Pericles and Cymbeline. None fits the comic mode.
How much further can he carry sex by fraud? Abandoning deception as a plot device, Shakespeare writes Troilus and Cressida. Here, Thersites and Pandarus blatantly voice their cynicism about love, sex, and the heroics of war. The only deception is the self-deception of the Homeric heroes, revealed by these two outspokenly cynical characters as nakedly flawed. Even if Cressida misses her uncle Pandarus’ allusions to sex in terms of the market place and her as commodity, she knows what she’s getting into with Troilus:
Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.
That she beloved knows nought that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungain’d more than it is:
That she was never yet that ever knew
Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.
Perhaps Troilus and Cressida’s assignation is the sort of bedtrick my friend had in mind when he criticized my title; it’s a sexual transaction. We’ve come a long way from Measure for Measure and All’s Well, troublesome as they may be. Shakespeare moves on to tragedy.